'Immaculate hack' of McCain site takes gay turn

GOP senator appeared to back same-sex marriage

By GREGORY ROBERTS, P-I REPORTER

Updated 10:00 pm, Wednesday, March 28, 2007

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Newsvine.com CEO Mike Davidson didn't hack his way into Republican presidential candidate John McCain's MySpace page: He merely changed an image on his own site that McCain's site was using. The joke message in this image said Sen. McCain, R-Ariz., in a reversal of his previous position, was endorsing gay marriage -- "particularly marriage between passionate females."(Photo courtesy of Newsvine.com) less

Newsvine.com CEO Mike Davidson didn't hack his way into Republican presidential candidate John McCain's MySpace page: He merely changed an image on his own site that McCain's site was using. The joke message in ... more

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'Immaculate hack' of McCain site takes gay turn

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Republican presidential candidate John McCain came out squarely in support of gay marriage Tuesday -- for about an hour.

That's how long it took his campaign to correct a satirical message from a Seattle Internet entrepreneur on McCain's page on MySpace.com, the social networking site increasingly popular with politicians.

The joke message said Sen. McCain, R-Ariz., in a reversal of his previous position, was endorsing gay marriage -- "particularly marriage between passionate females."

"It seems like everybody's taking it with pretty good humor," Davidson, 32, said Wednesday in the offices of Newsvine, a company he co-founded a year ago as a community-generated news media site.

Davidson said he's got nothing against McCain as a candidate. He pulled off the prank to slap the campaign's wrist over a breach of Internet etiquette.

A Web-page designer, Davidson didn't like the looks of the basic MySpace layout. So he wrote some computer code to create a "more tasteful" format and offered it free to all on his mikeindustries.com blog.

He asked that users credit him for the design. And he also provided some sample graphics to illustrate the kinds of images that users of the code could incorporate into their MySpace pages, while requesting that users supply their own images

Worse, instead of coming up with its own format for a list of links and contacts or even using Davidson's sample, the campaign simply linked to the list on Davidson's own MySpace page.

And that meant that every time someone visited McCain on MySpace, the page reached across the Internet to Davidson's computer and pulled in his list, soaking up some of Davidson's transmission capacity, or bandwidth, and potentially slowing his access to the Web.

That's a no-no.

When Davidson figured out what the McCain campaign was up to, he set a trap: He created a graphic with the fictitious gay-marriage message and instructed his computer to send it to anyone trying to grab his personal MySpace contact-list image. So the next time McCain's MySpace page fetched the image, it came up with the salute to passionate females.

"The problem has been corrected," a McCain spokesman said Wednesday.

Davidson didn't touch a thing on McCain's MySpace page and he broke no laws. It was, Davidson wrote on his blog, "the immaculate hack."

It also attracted a lot of attention. Within minutes after Davidson posted the tale of the prank on Newsvine Tuesday, a popular tech blog reported it and it later appeared on major media Web sites. And Newsvine's own site was overwhelmed by visitors Wednesday.

"It's been amazing how many people have picked this up," he said. "The reaction's been pretty positive."